How tech companies are lying to us

The many "lies" of the tech industry

According to Arun Maini, companies are currently lying more than ever to make even the smallest improvements in the latest product generation look like huge advances. The following marketing strategies are mentioned in particular:

• "Up to", usually used for performance or battery-life claims, such as "up to 8x faster", instead of concrete performance gains. These claims are often restricted even further in footnotes, for example by comparing them against five-year-old versions or limiting them to very specific situations. By contrast, manufacturers often do not discuss the performance gain of an Apple M5 over an Apple M4 at all. Our reviews, such as the Apple MacBook Pro 14 with M5 Max chip, available here on Amazon, naturally address this.
• The promise of higher efficiency, which is increasingly combined with performance gains, is also a double-edged sword, since both usually cannot be used at the same time. For example, a chip may be described as "up to 23 percent faster" while also being "20 percent more efficient".
• "Imaginary specs", where the top configuration of an EV or its maximum range in a very specific setup is prominently combined with the lowest price of the entry-level version.
• "Unified memory" instead of RAM: An example of creatively renaming familiar industry standards, which manufacturers, such as Apple in this case, use to make comparisons with the competition more difficult and to sell upgrades at higher prices. Other examples of these made-up specs come from the TV segment: "Motion Rate" instead of "Refresh Rate", or the entire "ULED, QLED, QNED" group, which is meant to evoke OLED but is based on LCD tech.
• 1-inch sensors in cameras and smartphones or 1.5K displays with Full-HD resolution are further examples of made-up specs that have little to do with reality but are widely used in the tech sector.
• New software features, such as AI improvements in a new product, are becoming increasingly important, although they are often also rolled out to older models through an update, something that is practically never mentioned at the launch event.
• The smartphone industry’s annual glass improvements and labels, such as Ceramic Shield, are also worth questioning, especially since drop resistance and scratch resistance are actually negatively correlated. In other words, the more resistant the current Gorilla Glass formulation is, the more easily it scratches because it is softer. The more scratch-resistant and harder it becomes, the more easily the glass breaks. Marques Brownlee has also made a separate video on this topic, which also covers Apple’s Ceramic Shield.
• Suggested "free storage upgrades" created by dropping the cheaper base model with less storage from the previous year.
• Everyday materials that are virtually elevated with creative labels such as "surgical grade", "military grade", or "aircraft-grade", suggesting special quality.
• "Pointless" measurements, such as a product’s thickness being measured at the thinnest point instead of the thickest point or under especially creative conditions. Last year, one particularly prominent example was the claim of an alleged foldable record without a screen protector. Other examples in this category include the increasingly high peak brightness figures, currently reaching up to 6,000 nits, which have little real-world relevance. Here, too, our smartphone reviews usually help.
• Last but not least, smartphone cameras in particular are often advertised with new features that have little practical relevance, such as 200MP sensors or, in Nothing’s case, up to 140x zoom. In practice, users usually see little to no improvement from this. In this context, many of the official sample photos and "Shot on" videos and photos also need to be mentioned. While they are often actually produced with the respective product, they are frequently created with the help of additional and usually highly professional equipment such as gimbals, lighting, or filters, as Marques Brownlee criticizes in conclusion.